The FISMA Focus IPD

From: Financial Times

Yuval Noah Harari

Forget about listening to ourselves. In the age of data, algorithms have the answer, writes the historian Yuval Noah Harari

For thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people. Jean-Jacques Rousseau summed up this revolution in Emile, his 1762 treatise on education. When looking for the rules of conduct in life, Rousseau found them “in the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can efface. I need only consult myself with regard to what I wish to do; what I feel to be good is good, what I feel to be bad is bad.” Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all.

From: Environmental Leader

By: Ken Silverstein

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“The reliance of all of our critical energy infrastructures on electricity places a very high premium on a reliable, modern and hardened electric grid, as well as our efforts to understand, develop and evolve our emergency response capability to ever-changing and evolving cyber-threats,” Moniz testified before the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, last week.

From: FedScoop

DevOps breaks down traditional management silos, but cross-departmental teaming, in government, raises important questions about lines of authority, two officials said.

By Shaun Waterman

DevOps, the trendy management philosophy that aims at rapidly developing and deploying software, raises important, even “philosophical,” questions about the role of cybersecurity in a government agency, two officials said Tuesday.

“It’s a philosophical discussion … What is the role of the [Chief Information Security Officer] and the authorizing official within an agency” organized according to the DevOps ideal, said Transportation Security Administration CIO Steven Rice. He said the management restructuring implied by DevOps would raise questions for government agencies about lines of authority — for example the sign-off on the deployment of new software.

From: MeriTalk

By: Eleanor Lamb

Eighty-one percent of Federal agencies use data analytics for cybersecurity. However, 59 percent of Federal agencies report cybersecurity breaches once a month due to inability to fully analyze their data.

According to MeriTalk’s report titled “Navigating the Cybersecurity Equation,” government agencies are struggling to derive cybersecurity intelligence from big data. To create this report, MeriTalk, on behalf of Cloudera, conducted an online survey of 150 Federal IT cybersecurity decision-makers in July 2016. MeriTalk released the report on Aug. 29. The survey found that, while most agencies use data analytics, only 45 percent of those agencies believe their efforts are “highly effective.”

From: Lexology

Timothy P. Tobin and Katherine Gasztonyi | Hogan Lovells