All posts by : Shamima A

The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released guidance to help federal government civilian agencies reduce their cybersecurity risks.

The Federal Civilian Executive Branch Operational Cybersecurity Alignment plan out Monday asks agencies to develop their cyber capabilities with a focus on asset management, vulnerability management, defensible architecture, supply chain resilience and incident detection and response. 

“The ultimate destination on this shared journey is more synchronized and robust cyber defenses, greater communication, and increased agility and resilience across the federal enterprise, resulting in a more cohesive government enterprise capable of defending itself against evolving cyber threats,” the document says.

The release is one of several papers the cyber agency has advanced in the wake of cyberattacks targeting the federal government in the 2020s. 

Government agencies are target-rich environments for cybercriminals because of the troves of information that are stored inside their internal databases. Agency staff are frequent targets of phishing emails that aim to siphon their login credentials, potentially granting hackers access to sensitive or even classified information.

Agencies across the federal ecosystem are accelerating improvements to their internal security posture as part of a maturity deadline in which they will have to implement zero trust architecture in their systems by Sept. 30. A tranche of major agencies have nearly met that deadline requiring them to build out and adopt the framework on their networks, federal CIO Clare Martorana said earlier this month.

Two Democratic senators are asking leadership in the Biden administration to do more to mitigate risks of artificial intelligence algorithms making biased decisions. 

Sens. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young in a Monday letter that federal agencies need to establish more safeguards to prevent algorithmic discrimination. 

“Without new protections, today’s supercharged, AI-powered algorithms risk reinforcing and magnifying the discrimination that marginalized communities already experience due to poorly-trained and -tested algorithms,” the letter reads. “The stakes — and harms — are especially high where entities use algorithms to make ‘consequential decisions,’ such as an individual’s application for a job, their treatment at a hospital, their admission to an educational institution, or their qualification for a mortgage.”

The senators want federal agencies utilizing AI technologies in their operations to be required to develop safeguards and build capacity around civil rights protections around AI. Algorithmic discrimination has caught federal attention before, notably when the Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a warning in may of this year to bring attention to how AI-assisted application software could erroneously discriminate against applicants. 

Markey and Schumer note that the Biden administration has also taken “significant steps” to reduce the room for algorithmic discrimination, mainly through guidance mandated by President Joe Biden’s AI executive order. 

They noted that OMB in particular has spearheaded much of these mandates, and the agency’s latest AI policies and guidance, specifically around “rights-impacting AI.”

The senators recommend that OMB provide agency chief AI officers with adequate resources and expertise to mitigate AI algorithms’ threats to civil liberties, and to establish and fund civil rights offices at agencies that are using AI in decision making where such offices don’t currently exist.

“These new offices — along with existing civil rights offices — should be staffed with technologists and experts in algorithmic discrimination whose job responsibilities include mitigating algorithmic bias and discrimination and facilitating proactive and ongoing outreach to civil rights stakeholders and affected populations,” the lawmakers wrote. 

In addition to increased guidance and workforce to focus on mitigating algorithmic-based harm, the senators ask OMB to provide evidence that customers of federal government services can opt out of utilizing AI-powered algorithms, a choice seen with AI-powered algorithms in biometrics technologies. 

As of Monday morning, 55 large active wildfires were blazing throughout the West, burning more than 2 million acres and displacing tens of thousands of people. Wildfires have ravaged more than 7 million acres so far this summer—the largest acreage to have burned through early September since 2018, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Now, to get a handle on the growing problem, some governments are turning to AI.

In California, where half a million acres are currently burning, the state is hoping it can use artificial intelligence to prevent fires from burning out of control in the first place. Last year, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, began using ALERTCalifornia’s AI-equipped network of about 1,200 cameras to scan for smoke. ALERTCalifornia, which is managed by the University of California, San Diego, is a public safety program working to understand wildfires and other natural hazards and determine short- and long-term impacts on people and the environment.

When AI spots a potential fire on ALERTCalifornia’s network of cameras, it draws a red bounding box around the affected area and provides a percentage of how certain it is that it found smoke. Trained personnel monitoring the footage vet and confirm the alerts and initiate the appropriate action. Time magazine recognized the collaborative effort as one of the top innovations of 2023.

Early results indicate the technology is working. Used in all 21 Cal Fire dispatch centers statewide for the past year, AI has alerted emergency managers to fires before 911 calls did more than 30% of the time, said Caitlin Scully, ALERTCalifornia’s communications program manager.

Between Sept. 1 and Dec. 31 of last year, responders were dispatched to wildland fires 278 times, with ALERTCalifornia noting 190 of them before or at the same time a 911 call was received, wrote Isaac Sanchez, deputy chief of communications at Cal Fire, in an email to Route Fifty. For at least six fires, no 911 call was ever received and, because of the early detection, all of the fires were kept to less than 1 acre.

“The faster [emergency managers] can get out there to either start immediately fighting the fire or get trucks out there or get personnel or drop people out of a helicopter or get planes on it,” Scully said, “the more likely they are able to reach their goal of keeping those fires [to] within 10 acres before they explode into anything out of control.”

The artificial intelligence was trained on datasets that ALERTCalifornia has collected since it started implementing sensor-equipped cameras more than 20 years ago to monitor for wildfires in San Diego’s Laguna Mountains.

“It’s really twofold—the camera network and then also this great data collection that we have,” Scully said. “It has everything we need in order to learn how to spot smoke or other incidents. We also have a longstanding relationship with Cal Fire, and so by working collaboratively between the UC San Diego scientists and then the Cal Fire experts, we were able to come together and develop this AI tool that is really, really useful to them because they were part of it from the very inception.”

California also is using the program Wildfire Analyst, AI and machine learning algorithms to evaluate fire behavior and risk.

“By leveraging the Wildfire Analyst solution, we can enhance our ability to forecast fire spread, intensity and impact, ultimately improving response strategies and minimizing damage,” said Cal Fire’s Sanchez. “The AI and machine learning algorithms can process and integrate diverse datasets, including weather conditions, topography, fuel characteristics and satellite imagery. These algorithms can identify patterns and correlations that may not be apparent through conventional analysis. For instance, machine learning models can be trained to recognize the influence of specific variables on fire behavior, such as the effect of wind speed on fire spread or the impact of humidity levels on fuel moisture.”

In June at the Fire Weather Testbed in Boulder, Colorado, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service tested its next generation fire system, which can spot fires as small as 1 acre—much like ALERTCalifornia—using AI that analyzes imagery from geostationary satellites in orbit 22,000 miles above Earth.

The alerts are posted to a web dashboard, where a human can confirm the blaze and decide if any action is required.

“It’s really combining the automated satellite detection with data layers that allow decision-makers to sort those detections in ways that are meaningful to the job they have to do, what region they’re working in, what fire weather conditions they’re concerned about, those types of things,” said Mike Pavolonis, manager of the Wildland Fire Program at NOAA. “It will track that fire over time … [to] tell you its intensity, how it’s evolving, a little bit of information about how it’s spreading. The whole idea here is to enable more efficient and effective decision-making.”

The system is still in testing, but the agency plans to make it fully operational in one to two years. The Integrated Warning Team paradigm, which was also part of the testbed, will be the best way to reach state and local partners, Pavolonis added.

The paradigm speeds the exchange of information among National Weather Service meteorologists, state and local land managers and emergency managers, enabling them to issue fire warnings using the same dissemination channels the agency uses to issue tornado warnings. Tests showed that it can take 60 minutes to get a fire warning out without the protocol and an average of nine minutes with it, he said.

Overall, AI is a force-multiplier for wildfire detection and management, Pavolonis said.

“The number of different sources and the volume and environmental data and information that decision-makers are confronted with constantly is enormous, and it’s growing, and humans can’t examine every bit of data as it comes in,” he said. “They need some automation to help them extract the most relevant pieces of data at the right time to make decisions they have to make. That’s really where AI comes in.”

Former federal executives and good government groups on Tuesday warned lawmakers that the reimplementation of Schedule F and subsequent conversion of tens of thousands of federal employees into at-will political appointees could harm the nation’s security posture.

The ex-officials’ testimony came as part of a hearing on Schedule F, the abortive 2020 effort to remove the civil service protections of employees in “policy-related” jobs throughout the federal government that former President Trump has vowed to revive if elected this fall, hosted by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. No Republican spoke at the hearing; James Sherk, an architect of the initiative and an advisor to Trump during his first term, was initially scheduled to appear but ultimately was not listed in a press release announcing the hearing Monday.

“The prior administration sought to replace 50,000 nonpartisan career civil servants with appointees who followed the former president’s politics,” said Committee Chairman Gary Peters, D-Mich. “This change would not just hinder government efficiency, it would also be disastrous for the American people, draining the federal government of institutional knowledge, expertise and continuity. It would slow down services, make us less prepared for when disaster strikes, and erode public trust in government.”

Former leaders at the Defense and Homeland Security departments said that arguments by proponents in favor of Schedule F—that it is too hard to fire poor-performing federal workers and that presidents are stymied by entrenched bureaucrats resistant to their policies—fundamentally misunderstand the role of nonpartisan civil servants.

“There are two essential roles for civil servants, and one is to inform policy,” said Elaine Duke, who served as deputy Homeland secretary and undersecretary for management at the Homeland Security Department under presidents of both parties. “With years of experience, it’s important for civil servants to understand the policy objective and help inform it so that it can be tailored to be most effective. The second role that civil servants have is executing the policy, and that’s tied to the first role, because we learn a lot through execution of the policy like what works and doesn’t work.”

Both Duke and Peter Levine, former deputy chief management officer and acting undersecretary for personnel and readiness at the Defense Department from 2015 through 2017, said they had never seen a career federal employee resist the policy decision of a political appointee.

“The ability of career civil servants to provide open and candid advice without losing their jobs enables political appointees like me to benefit from their knowledge and expertise,” Levine said. “The risk that political appointees will fail to listen to the informed views of career civil servants is far greater than the risk that civil servants will fail to carry out a directive from a political appointee once it has been made.”

Levine said that even if a second Trump administration implements Schedule F but is constrained in how it uses its authority, ultimately it will begin a trend toward an even more unwieldy presidential transition every four or eight years.

“The president who first imposes Schedule F would probably figure, ‘I can just replace people over time so there won’t be this great discontinuity [between administrations],’” Levine said. “The problem is that if one president replaces 2,000 or 3,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 then the next president will feel they can’t rely on those 2, 3, 5 or 10,000 people . . . If instead of replacing a few hundred political appointees and being able to rely on the career employees [during a transition], you head to replace 2,000 or 3,000 or 5,000, you wouldn’t be able to keep the lights on.”

Jenny Mattingley, vice president of governmental affairs at the Partnership for Public Service, said in addition to taking action to protect the federal workforce from attacks on the merit system, lawmakers should examine other ways to improve management to address “root causes” like difficulty in dealing with poor performers.

“One thing that we see often across federal agencies is an ad hoc—or often cut—training budgets, leadership development budgets,” she said. “These are not things that we do in terms of really developing our workforce and our leaders. So to do the things that we talk about, creating good environments, a good culture, a strong leadership culture, in the private sector, particularly at large companies, you see a lot of investment in that employee piece, and so we would encourage you to look at how to strengthen those things within the government as well.”