FCW Insider: Aug. 27

Meet the 2019 Rising Stars -- early-career leaders already are having an outsized impact on government IT.

Ellen Lord, the Pentagon's procurement chief, said that the Department of Defense was banning military purchase of commercially available and popular drones made by China-based DJI, and that the U.S. would work to nurture a domestic supply. Lauren C. Williams reports.

DARPA thinks it can detect automated disinformation campaigns across a range of media by focusing on common machine-generated errors. Derek B. Johnson explains the semantics of disinformation.

Where privately owned critical infrastructure providers had balked at sharing threat data five years ago, it's become now a critical, commercial necessity, according to Brian Harrell, assistant director for infrastructure security at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Mark Rockwell has more.

Quick Hits

*** Oracle filed a notice of appeal in its lawsuit against the Department of Defense over its $10 billion cloud program. Oracle lost a bid to roll back the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure procurement over alleged procurement violations and organizational conflicts of interest among Pentagon staffers who worked on the program and set up its requirements.

"Federal procurement laws specifically bar single award procurements such as JEDI absent satisfying specific, mandatory requirements, and the [Court of Federal Claims] in its opinion clearly found DOD did not satisfy these requirements," Oracle general counsel Dorian Daley said in a statement. Daley added that "the very analysis in the opinion compels a determination that the procurement was unlawful on several grounds."

DOD spokeswoman Elissa Smith said in July, "While DOD disagrees with the Court's analysis on the Department's use of the fixed price justification for the single award determination, we also note the Court upheld DOD's companion justification for a single award."

*** Mark Forman, who led international public sector business for Unisys is shifting to take on a new role at the company -- vice president of digital government in the federal business. Foreman led the Office of E-Government and IT – the position that evolved into today's federal CIO – during the administration of President George W. Bush. Washington Technology has more.

*** President Donald Trump signed a law last week that gives Congress more resources for digital constituent services involving federal agencies. The Creating Advanced Streamlined Electronic Services for Constituents (CASES) Act of 2019, introduced by Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) replaces an outdated, paper-based privacy process lawmakers had to use to work with agencies. The new law requires the Office of Management and Budget to create a new electronic form for agencies to use to interact with lawmakers on constituent services requests and directs agencies to set a system to authenticate and accept the electronic document.